The Mare from the Moon

by Evilhumour

Chpater Five

As Luna prepared herself to enter the realm of dreams to continue her duties, she settled into her bed and thought of the mare sleeping off in the guest chambers.

Spliced Genome was a mostly unknown mare in their castle and while she and her sister had talked briefly about her, there was something that Luna kept quiet on and she wasn’t sure if Celestia had noticed it or not or if she did notice it and kept quiet on the matter too.

What Spliced Genome told them about herself was eerily similar to her own story. Spliced admitted to being sentenced to her world’s moon for a thousand years for war crimes before making her escape. How different was that from her time as Nightmare Moon?

Luna focused on the key details that separated the two tales; Spliced had not served her full sentence, Spliced was at heart an ordinary mare while Luna was something much more than that and Luna had been redeemed. There was no indication or reason to believe that Spliced had changed.

The implications were very unsettling; if Luna couldn’t learn anything of Spliced’s past, she would need to find the entrance the mare had used to reach their world and find a way to send her back, so she wouldn’t be able to threaten Equestria, its population and the world at large.

Closing her eyes, Luna entered the dream land and began to search for Spliced’s unconscious mind while attending to the minds sleeping now. Luna was proud that she was able to tend to everyone’s mind once again, not just their ponies and those who lived in Equestria.

It was not hard to find the mare’s mind; it being an unusual bubble in what Luna was accustomed to. Swimming through the realm of dreams, Luna made her way towards the mind. The dream world appeared to be akin to constant chaos but it was a lie. The realm of dreams was in flux because that was the nature of dreams. It was a constant flow of change that followed patterns and it took a very specially trained eye to learn what was normal and what was something else.

As such, tonight the dream world was taking on the appearance of an ocean with each dreamer being a pearl within a bivalve. As she looked towards Spliced’s clam, which was by itself, she could tell it felt slightly off, no doubt due to the fact she did not belong here.

Reaching out with a hoof, she touched Spliced’s mind and entered her dreams.

---

Luna opened her eyes to see herself in a strange white room with Spliced watching herself choke to death, while the actual Spliced let out an annoyed sigh.

“Seriously,” she muttered to herself. “That will be the last time I will ever eat spaghetti.”

“What the…” Luna said, causing the mare below her to snap her head up in surprise.

“What the?” Spliced repeated, staring at her in obvious shock. “How did you get here - wait, I must be dreaming right now,” she said slowly before a massive smile grew on her face. “Which means I can do this!”

The room changed from the odd white room to a much larger room filled with all kinds of scientific equipment and machines.

“Now,” Spliced said, her eyes gleaming. “Let’s do some SCIENCE!”

And in a whirl of activity, Luna found herself strapped to an exam table, while Spliced was bustling about in another corner of the room. When she returned to Luna’s side, she was carrying a scalpel in her aura. Instead of admonishing the mare as was her first instinct, Luna decided to see how Spliced would react without anypony really watching her.

“I can’t wait to see how another Pure’s brain works in this world!” she said excitedly. “Even if you are just some dream version I’ve conjured up, I will be the first one to do an in-depth study of a living brain and analyze the differences between your world’s and mine… I’ll make history!” Laughing in glee, she lowered the scalpel towards Luna’s head, only to pause. “Wait a minute…”

“Yes?” Luna gave her a look, noting how this mare was reacting to the slimmest of opportunities to do some highly unethical scientific research.

“Excuse me.” Setting the scalpel down on a nearby tray, Spliced headed for one of the odd-looking devices, examining it for a moment, then returned to Luna’s side. “I almost forgot I had an MRI in here. That will be much more effective than just cutting out the organ right away. And not physically invasive which could cause some trauma to the organ.”

“What’s an MRI?” Luna asked curiously as Spliced began wheeling the table over to the device while tensing her limbs to flee. “And would it even have an effect on somepony you believe you’ve conjured up out of a dream?”

Spliced froze. “You’re right,” she said, and Luna was certain that if she’d had fingers like a minotaur or talons like a griffon, she’d have snapped them. “Damn. And here I was so hoping to get a scan of your brain so I could have some solid data!”

Luna breathed a sigh of relief that she was able to redirect the mare’s focus into something less vicious. “If you want data, I can always show you to the castle library when we’re both awake,” she suggested.

Spliced’s eyes widened again. “You have a library‽”

“Of course,” Luna replied. “Why wouldn’t we?”

Spliced smiled. “I like how you think.”

“Good. Then, if you don’t mind,” Luna gave her a look. “Would you please let me loose?”

“Oh. Right.” Spliced began releasing the straps. “You know, you’re pretty unusual for a dream of mine, especially as you are not me dying over and over again,” she remarked with a chuckle. “I’d almost swear you were the real Princess.”

“I am the real Princess,” Luna said as she gave her a look as she was freed. “Dream-walking is one of my special talents - I use it to help our subjects, and others, to cope with their nightmares. Like the one you were having before.”

Spliced froze. “You’re serious.”

“I am,” Luna replied.

“You’re serious,” Spliced repeated, shaking nervously. “Oh sweet hell, I am so so sorry! If I had any idea, I would not have done any of this! I-I, I honestly-” Now frantically pacing back and forth as Luna finished getting off the table, she began babbling. “All I wanted, was to be free… to not be stuck in that prison and not have to worry about waiting for the right moment to get out of their sight, to have a place where I could do my studies without having to worry about somepony trying to kill me for them again, ‘cause even if it’s not permanent, dying isn’t fun and I’ve done it so many times and-erk!” She began clutching her throat, as if she’d run out of air.

“Spliced Genome,” Luna said as calmly as she could. “You cannot die in your dreams, not even temporarily. Believe me, I know. And you can especially not die of asphyxiation, when there isn’t any air to begin with.”

Spliced froze, then began to breath normally. “Th-thank you,” Spliced let out a sigh, rubbing her face. “It is just since I’ve escaped, there has been a lingering fear that I would be forced back there and you cannot understand what it is like to be all by yourself for year after year, century after century.”

Luna couldn’t help but scoff, shaking her head. “I believe I can, Spliced,” she said, seeing that the mare wasn't lying to her.

“Excuse me, missy, but I am four hundred years old and I think I might know a bit more than you,” Spliced said, throwing her head back.

“And my sister and I are over a thousand years young,” Luna said as she booped Spliced’s nose, with the mare going crosseyed before gulping as she realized Luna wasn’t lying.

“I rescind my comment…” Spliced said as they appeared back on the moon’s surface and let out a melancholy sigh. “While I still am very hesitant to call this magic, I cannot fully explain all of this. Me talking to you in my dream, me being in an entirely different world from the one I grew up in and you somehow moving me from the moon to this planet… it defies all logic I’ve ever known!”

“How did you get here, by the way?” Luna asked, tilting her head in a casual manner.

“Through this odd… thing,” Spliced said as she directed Luna towards a cliff wall. Luna could tell the mare was now being evasive, but exactly how much she was leaving out, that was the question. “It is through here,”Spliced said as she lead them through a hole among countless others and down a slope that got darker and darker until they reached the bottom. Luna could not see a thing and she knew it was undoubtedly due to Spliced’s past experiences shaping her psyche. This, she could tell, was also the reason why the trip was taking far longer than it should have. Since her own return, she had visited the moon a few times, just to explore it under her own power, and between that and her own magical connection to it, she had been able to determine exactly how large it was. But if this trip was anything to go by, either Spliced’s moon was far larger than theirs, which she doubted, or she wasn’t remembering the distance quite right.

“There, that’s how I managed to travel between the worlds,” Spliced pointed a now existing shaft of light and Luna could not hold back a hiss escaping her lips.

“That should not be,” Luna said, studying the mental replication of the shaft of light. “That is a fracture between dimensions; it’s an improper portal. Not dangerous but it should not be.” Luna turned to look at Spliced. “How did you find this?”

Spliced shrugged. “There was an incident, a few hundred years ago… I needed to get out, really stretch my legs and go exploring, and when that flare happened and gave me the chance to get out of sight, I took it. And when I was out, I kind of tripped over something and fell a ways, ended up at the entrance to this cave. It looked interesting, so I went in and started looking around… and finally I found that.” She gestured to the shaft. “I have no idea how it got there, or even how long it’s been there. I just know that not long ago, I’d had enough and came back here, to see what it was really capable of. And when I stepped into it, I wound up on your moon to an exact match of mine.”

Luna frowned internally. She could tell there were bits of truth in what Spliced had said, and the last part had been absolutely true. But some of it was not and that was very troubling.

“It is amazing you found this all on your own, Spliced,” Luna prompted with the mare darting her eyes around.

“Yes I know,” Spliced lied to her while glancing away. “But even if I did have help, I wouldn’t take it. I don’t care to be beholden to anypony at the cost of myself.”

The full truth, at long last, and an odd manner to admit it, she thought to herself.

“That, I can understand,” she said aloud, eying the smaller mare. “Still it was luck that I found you on the moon. Otherwise, I believe you would have been in a grave amount of peril.”

“Yeah,” Spliced said as she rubbed the back of her head as they viewed the green alicorn on the moon in her orange suit. “I didn’t think things through and without you, I would have been stuck for ages dragging myself back.”

“You do not seem all that concerned about being put through a continuous loop of dying and just dragging yourself back,” Luna remarked.

“Princess… there was an incident a few hundred years ago where I was put through more deaths in one day than I had the entire hundred years plus that I was in that place.” Spliced coughed nervously. “It wasn’t a fun experience… but I learned from it. I just view it as stubbing my hoof now, rather painfully but nothing major.” Spliced then grinned and elbowed Luna. “I mean, I did stab myself at the dinner table to prove my resurrection abilities after all.” She looked at the mare on the moon’s surface. “If I had to drag myself forwards inch by inch every time I came back, so be it.”

Luna nodded at this, taking in the fact how little would be able to deter her and how they would need to alter any plan to deal with Spliced if she proved hostile towards them as death was not an option.

With a sigh, Spliced turned to Luna and rubbed the back of her neck. “Look, I am still very sorry about the whole trying to cut you open thing - I really did think you were just a fragment of my dream, not a real pony I’d actually hurt. I was just very curious about how your carbuncle would be compared to those I know.”

Luna smiled to herself and looked at the other mare. “As I said before, we do have the most extensive library in the castle, Spliced. And I do know that Celestia has submitted herself to medical exams in case of an absolute worst-case scenario as well as to further the medical field, and those notes are very detailed.”

“Really?” Spliced asked, her eyes widening and tail wagging, becoming an almost a mirror of a certain princess of friendship when presented with a new book.

“Once you awaken, I can take you there.”

With barely repressed squee, Spliced nodded her head with Luna smiling and dispelling the dream. Along with the location of this possible broken gateway, which she would investigate as soon as she could, she would further watch over this strange mare in her land and determine how dangerous she truly was.